How To Grow Mushrooms In Bottles

hey guys it's Tony from fresh cat mushrooms calm and today I wanted to do a video on growing mushrooms in bottles [Music] now why would anybody want to grow mushrooms and bottles as opposed to typical mushroom grow bags there's a couple of different reasons for this if you want to run a large mushroom farm using bottles really helps the mechanization process you're being able to move the bottles through different machinery for inoculating and for all sorts of other processes that otherwise would have to be done by hand so it can really help mechanize the process but even for smaller growers or even home growers there is some advantages to bottles one problem with mushroom grow bags is there a one-time use and if you grow a lot of mushrooms you'll start to see these piles of mushroom grow bags and maybe start to think about other ways that you can have perhaps more environmentally friendly way of growing mushrooms growing mushrooms and bottles provides that because you can reuse the bottles over and over and over again there are some disadvantages to using bottles as well one of them is that you have to clean out the bottle after you harvest the mushrooms you're also likely to get smaller mushrooms and that's just because the bottles a lot smaller volume of substrate to produce the mushroom fruiting body but in general the process is pretty simple we're gonna mix up our substrate and then fill the bottles but in the center of the bottle we're gonna bore a small hole just as a place where we can add our grain spawn to inoculate the bottles after that we're gonna put a lid on the bottles and allow them to colonize for a week or so and once they're fully colonized you open up the top of the lid scrape off the top layer of mycelium and should be able to fruit those mushrooms now in this video I'm going to be growing enoki mushrooms now this is a mushroom that is commonly grown in bottles to get that characteristic skinny look with a small cap that enoki is well known for but you can grow many other mushrooms and bottles including my attack' old types of oysters including king oysters pretty much anything except shiitake now there are bottles that are made specifically for growing mushrooms and they look just like this they're 100% reusable and 100% autoclave able so you can put them in your pressure sterilizer to sterilize the substrate the other cool thing is that they come with a filter lid so this lid acts as a filter for any of the incoming air when the bottle is cooling off after sterilization or while the bottles colonizing it'll allow the mycelium to breathe while preventing contamination these are the bottles that are made specially for larger mushroom farms that want to mechanize their processes now if your growing at home and you want to grow mushrooms and bottles a mason jar it works just as well the only difference is you're gonna have to modify the lid in order to allow the mycelium to breathe so for this one I've just simply drilled a small hole in the top and pulled through some poly stuffing or pillow stuffing these are the exact same bottles that you can use to make grain spawn so they work really well for both purposes so now we're just going to go ahead and fill these bottles with substrate I have the Masters mix here I got another video on that but this is basically just a 50/50 mix between soy hulls and hardwood sawdust I'm gonna go ahead and fill the bottles right up to below the net and then we're gonna go ahead and bore a hole right through the middle of them just as a place that we can add our spawn so I'm sure you can come up with a better way of doing this they're filling them automatically but basically just use a spoon big plastic spoon and fill up the bottles so you want the substrate to be packed but not too hard in fact but compress down a little bit so basically once the bottles filled up I just kind of knock it down a couple times just to get a bit of compaction and then you find if it goes a little bit too low you just might need to add a little bit more substrate like I said you want the substrate to be right on the neck line of the bottle so once your bottles are all filled up the next step is to bore a hole through the center and that will serve as a place where you can inoculate it with your grain spawn I simply just take a handle of a wooden spoon and bore a hole right through the center of the bottle as you can see that leaves a nice place where you can inoculate with Green spawn that way the green spot can come right down to the bottom of the bottle and it can colonize the bottle from the inside to the outside instead of just going from the top down so these are the filter lids that are specially made for these bottles as you can see there's little tiny holes on the inside and those slits on the outside and that allows for air flow through the lid of the filter while filtering out any contamination that might be present and one more thing once you've drilled the hole in the center of your bottle make sure you're careful when you handling it because you can put them on their side and you put it upside down it'll collapse that hold and then when you take it over your sterilizer there won't be a hole in there to inoculate with your great spawn so once you bore the hole just be careful with it put the lid on and then just put it straight into the sterilizer when it comes out that hole should still be there and you'll have a place to add your green spot so that's it for this now we're gonna add these some sterilizer since these are smaller than the big 500 in box we only have to sterilize them for about 90 minutes so we're gonna put them in there for 90 minutes at 15 psi and when they come out they'll be ready for inoculation so before I use the bottle I want to go ahead and wipe it down wipe down the outside of the bottle with alcohol just to clean out any contamination that might be on the outside of the bottle you also want to wipe down with no alcohol the outside of this Monday and contamination might be sitting on the outside of the bag then we're simply gonna the corner open up the swanbeck [Music] ok so it's been about a week or so now since I inoculated these bottles and as you can see mycelium is starting to work its way through the substrate even through the bottom there and it's working its way from the middle out towards the edge of the bottle and probably about another week or so before these bottles are fully colonized and we'll be able to route them okay so here's the bottle as you can see it's fully colonized all the way through if you look closely there's already some fruits for me on the top of the bottle just go ahead and open that up and as you can see lots of little and no keys have already started to pin we're actually gonna remove those and scrape that off just so we have a fresh new layer of substrate for the mushrooms to fruit so I'm just gonna go ahead and pick those off [Music] and then I'm gonna take a fork and just scrape off a thin layer of substrate at the top and what that does is it kind of reinvigorates the top layer of mycelium and allows new pins to form at the mouth of the bottle so now we're going to go ahead and put this bottle in the fruiting chamber and wait for fruits [Applause] [Music] a lot of times with these bottles too if you want to get the tops to pin after you've scraped it once it's in the fruiting chamber so humidity isn't only really high you always take like a microfiber cloth or even a damp paper towel and just hold it place it on top of the bottle just like that and that'll keep the humidity really high between the top of the bottle and the top and substrate this is a technique that they use it some of the larger bottle farms obviously they don't use wet paper towel but they do have like blankets of microfiber cloth that they can lay over top of all the bottles to encourage pinning once the bottles have been put into the 30 chamber so I have another bottle now of you know key that's fully colonized and I was gonna do the same thing or just pop the lid off the bottle or move whatever's there and fruit it again but if you look inside this one you can see that it's absolutely covered in enoki fruiting bodies kind of looks like bean sprouts so it already fruit in the bottle way before it's fully colonized and it through did so much and grew so much that we got a whole heck of a lot of enoki so I think for this one I'm going to try something different I'm gonna remove all those fruits I'm gonna scrape the top of it I'm gonna put it back in the fruiting chamber with a taller rim around the neck of the bottle just because the enoki that I do have already fruiting the fruiting chamber it seems like they don't really want to grow too much higher than the neck of the bottle they end up with these short little mushrooms and want to get that long kind of traditional enoki look with them so I'm gonna play around with that and we'll see how it works so I'm sure there's a better way to do this but I just have this extra piece of a mushroom grow bag that I'm gonna wrap around the neck of the bottle and then just go ahead put an elastic band on it and there we go and I'm gonna do the same with the other two bottles that are in the girl room right now there we go so I hope that this extra piece of plastic will kind of encourage the no keys to grow further up and venture past the top of the bottle so that we can get that traditional long and oaky look and here's some enoki that I have fruiting just on a normal Masters mix fruiting block and you can see their fruit pretty nice all over the top of the block but you're still not getting that really long tall look and I'm thinking because they're not deprived of co2 which would help them grow nice and long but otherwise it's still look pretty nice you can also see in this bag that I have here the no key that's kind of fruit off the bottom at the side of the bag and worked its way up that looks more like your traditional Inoki just because what's wrong there it's gonna reach up fine to get to the fresh air that's what's trying to do so it's another reason why I'm hoping these these bags on the room of the bottles will help encourage that elongated growth so as you can see this method is actually working pretty well there's a enoki they're growing straight up now you can see they're making their way up past the neck of the bottle and working up through that sleeve so it won't be too much longer now before I'd want to harvest these and same with this one over here you're starting to grow straight up so as you can see growing enochian bottles works pretty well the enoki mushrooms are starting to push their way up through that sleeve and we're starting to get that longer kind of thin stem to look to the enoki mushroom that you used to when seeing it at the grocery store and growing mushrooms and bottles works for a lot of other species as well including oysters and even maitake and it's pretty much exact same process of course - putting that sleeve at the top for oysters etc you'd want to just leave them to grow right out from the top of the bottle so I'm going to let these mushrooms grow out more than it would be harvesting them but as far as growing mushrooms in bottles that's it for this video thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause]

Channel: FreshCap Mushrooms

Views: 776,701

Keywords: growing mushrooms in bottles, how to grow mushrooms in bottles, bottle culture, enoki mushroom, growing enoki mushroom, how to grow enoki, flamulina velutipes, mushroom grow bottles, mushroom bottle cultivation, bottle cultivation

Id: 0LzP_squuzg

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/EyeMustBeTrippin]

Yes. Look up broke boi tek. Shrooms grow in almost anything!